Hans Zappe is Professor of Micro-optics and Associate Dean of Engineering in the Department of Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Born in France and raised in New York, he earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at MIT and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in Electrical Engineering. After pursuing research activities in electronics, integrated optics and semiconductor lasers at IBM, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics and the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique, he joined the University of Freiburg in 2000, where he was Dean of Engineering from 2008 to 2010. His current research interests focus on tunable micro-optics, optical micro-systems for medical applications and novel nano-optics.